April 12, 2007

Thousands of Lebanese people blamed the British government, not just Israel, for the bombs that had fallen on their homes, because the UK had failed to press Israel to stop its disproportionate response to Hizbullah's attacks on civilians.

In your article in today's Guardian ("The world before Iraq") you say, referring to last summer's war in Lebanon:

Thousands of Lebanese people blamed the British government, not just Israel, for the bombs that had fallen on their homes, because the UK had failed to press Israel to stop its disproportionate response to Hizbullah's attacks on civilians.

As you can easily check from press reports of the time, Israel was the first to attack civilians, as an alleged "response" to Hizbullah's capturing and killing Israeli soldiers. Only then did Hizbullah retaliate by attacking Israeli civilian targets. This does not justify Hizbullah's retaliation. But the point is that soon after those events history was rapidly rewritten and you were somehow left with the false impression -- which your article further spreads among your readers -- that Hizbullah was the first to attack civilian targets, and Israel merely "responded" to this, albeit "disproportionately ". This is a small but significant illustration of the powerful pro-Israel brainwashing in the media. It even works on you -- who are clearly critical of UK and Israeli policy.

As an Israeli dissident, I urge you to get the Guardian to publish a correction to the factual error you made in your article. I wonder if they will.

Best wishes, Moshe Machover

I'm guessing they won't correct but who knows? Even Robert Fisk plays the hasbara parrot sometimes. I'll have to dig up some evidence of that last point but right now, work work work.